“I do admire those few persons in political life who see politics as their vocation, pursue clearly stated goals, and do not enrich themselves in the process. Their numbers are tiny in my country and in India. Charan Singh was such a man….….. with Charan Singh, I felt a certain kinship of character which perhaps will be revealed in my assessment of him in these volumes.” 

- Paul R Brass

This book, first of a three-volume series, straddles the conventional division between the history of an epoch in the politics of North India and a definitive biography – that of Chaudhary Charan Singh, a great son of India. 

It begins with bitter conflicts amongst rival aspirants and groups for power in Uttar Pradesh, the beginnings of the fragmentation of the Congress in Northern India, Charan Singh’s decisive role in splitting the party and mobilising the peasantry and backward castes of northern India, the rise of non-Congress politics and coalitions, and the creation of a broad social base across Northern India drawing its principal strength from the backward classes whose political rise in Northern India begins from this moment. This volume ends at a key point in the life of Charan Singh and the history of the Congress organization in UP, namely, his resignation from the government of Dr. Sampurnanand, beginning a new critical period in the history of the Congress in the state.

This volume follows the early public life, from 1937 to 1961, of Chaudhary Charan Singh, a man of principle and pride and a dedicated nationalist, who at once loved his country while condemning the path chosen for it by its political leadership. Charan Singh attempted throughout his public life to wrest power from the urban, elite castes in favor of the rural middle and lower castes and construct a Gandhian economy from the grassroots. He himself came from a humble background in the countryside, though he was no country bumpkin, but a self-made man of high intellect. From a middle self-cultivating peasant caste, he went on to embody and speak for a new social movement - that of the backward castes of Northern India. He molded a multiplicity of castes into a political coalition based on common class and economic interests, whose interests he always promoted and in whose advancement he played the most important role. 

Charan Singh provided Paul Brass generous access to his extensive private collection of files and papers, dating from the 1930s, from which Paul Brass crafted these volumes and published between 2010 and 2014. This was the culmination of a relationship of mutual respect based on a certain kinship of character since their first meet in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh in 1961. 

Paul R. Brass (1936-2022) was Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. During a career spanning 60 years, Paul extensively studied the political culture of the Indian subcontinent, wrote 18 well-received scholarly books and published scores of articles on South Asian politics and mass communal violence.